Thirty-five outstanding foreign-born business owners were celebrated at the sixth annual ILC Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards Dinner on May 4, 2017, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA. Featured speaker Jeff Bussgang, general partner at Flybridge Capital and co-chair of the Global Entrepreneur in Residence program, and Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Jay Ash paid tribute to the 35 nominees from 21 countries for starting 57 businesses in 25 Massachusetts towns, creating 3,800 jobs, and generating income and investment totaling more than $800 million.

Do you know an outstanding immigrant entrepreneur? Tell us about them here.

The 2017 Immigrant Entrepreneur Award winners:

Jose de la Rosa came to Boston in 1989 and worked his way through school, earning a degree in finance. His wife, Zoraida, was a nurse who noticed a gap in home health services. So de la Rosa and his wife founded Guardian Healthcarein 2008 with just three employees. Today, Guardian has nearly 300 full-time-equivalent employees providing culturally competent care to elderly and disabled adults throughout the state.

Josefina Luna is a founder and worker-owner of CEROCoop, which provides food waste composting solutions to supermarkets, healthcare facilities, hotels and restaurants. To date, CERO has diverted more than 3.2 million pounds of organic materials from incinerators and landfills. This year, it provided more than 200 cubic yards of compost-rich soil to Boston-area urban farms.

Sandro Catanzaro is the co-founder and chief innovation officer of DataXu, a programmatic marketing platform used by the world’s top brands like Ford and Sony. The platform is the commercial application of software he developed for NASA to transport humans to Mars. DataXu employs 350 people in 11 countries. Catanzaro is well-known for mentoring entrepreneurs and data scientists.

Dr. Johannes Fruehauf is founder of BioLabs Cambridge and the BioLabs network. BioLabs builds and operates co-working laboratory facilities for science-based startups to help them go further on limited capital. Dr. Fruehauf is also co-founder of a not-for-profit subsidiary, LabCentral. More than 150 companies have been created at Biolabs and LabCentral, and they have raised more than $1 billion.

Judging

The ILC Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards selection committee reviewed nominations and selected one winner in each category. The 2017 selection committee members were:

2017 Nominees

View the slideshow below to meet each of the outstanding nominees.

Previous Nominees and Winners

One hundred and eighty-nine Massachusetts business owners and innovators from 58 countries have been nominated and recognized for their outstanding accomplishments in the six years of The ILC Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards.

Business Growth

Fitzroy Alexander, Traditional Breads Inc., Lynn (2014 WINNER)

Herby Duverné, Taino Consulting Group, Boston (2016 WINNER)

Wendy Estrella, Estrella Law Firm, Lawrence (2016)

Eduardo & German Fernandez, Brothers Market, Inc., Dorchester (2016)

Francisco Fernandez, Happy Supermarket, Dorchester (2016)

Rafael Guzman, RM Technologies, Inc., Lawrence (2013 WINNER)

Venkat Kolluri, Chitika Inc./Cidewalk, Westborough (2015)

Marc-Andre Lebel, FRX Polymers, Inc., Chelmsford (2016)

Christine Lin, The Cambridge Institute of International Education, Waltham (2014)